After Civilisation I needed something different and I wanted to get back to my favourite genre – crime, so I feel straight into Dark Mirror. This is my first of Barry Maitalnd’s Kolla and Brock series – but it was about the sixth book in the series. I usually try to read crime series in order – Yes pedantic I know, but I like the characters to be revealed to me the same way that they are to the author. So what got me reading Dark Mirror out of order?
Well Maitland has been on my radar having seen his new book Chelsea Mansions in the book store (and read the recent review in the Sunday Herald, also there is the fact that he is an Australian, New South Welshmen even, and I should be supporting local talent – all of these things – but really it was the back cover that got me.
“When Marion Summers – red haired, beautiful and mysterious – collapses and dies in the rarefied surrounds of the London Library, DI Kathy Kolla and DCI David Brock are sent to head the investigation. Kathy finds a reluctant kinship with the feisty Marion, who had, like Kathy, lead a difficult homelife when young and struck out to London for independence. Marion’s research on the intriguing, adulteress circle of artists, wives, lovers and muses around Victorian artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti seems irrelevant until the use of arsenic arises. As Brock and Kolla get closer to the truth another victim dies an excruciating death by poison in a library, and it looks like a serial poisoner is on the loose”.
Murder in the library, whilst researching the Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood – I was hooked!
Reading Maitland’s biography, I noted that he had been a Professor of Architecture – so I was expecting lots of detail about buildings, wall finishes etc but nothing I can especially recall – he is good at building atmosphere into the story as it weaves around the suburbs of London, from St james Square, Notting Hill and Hampstead Heath. The story builds at a nice pace with a number of blind alleys and red herrings keep shifting the dimensions of the mystery. A few of them end up confusing things and are not fully resolved by the end of the book – including a rather distressing incident involving one of Kolla’s neighbours cat.
The mixing of history of the Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood and Victorian London provides a riveting backdrop to the modern murder mystery; it also gives the plot intellectual depth. I will definitely be tracking down Barry Maitland’s other books!
★★★★
